Today I read a post on twitter by OnTrack (see quote below), which seems to say that human contribution to data disasters is on the rise in the enterprise. To data recovery veterans, this is confirmation of what we have seen and come to expect in previous economic downturns. I wish to expand on this finding by adding that this is not isolated to enterprise environments. The increase of data disasters due to human error is alive and well in all business sizes, from the very large down to the micro sized. Cherry Systems has seen a three-fold increase in the number of such jobs as well.
The most common enterprise human error cases Kroll Ontrack sees include:
- Pulling the wrong drive. While trying to replace a failed disk in a RAID array, a healthy disk is accidentally removed.
- Reformatting a disk. During a server migration, the wrong SAN LUN is accidentally reformatted.
- Restoring corrupt/old backup data. A server containing a business-critical database is deleted by mistake and is restored with a corrupt or incomplete backup prior to realizing the backup is not sound.
- Rebuilding a bad array. Following a multiple drive failure in a RAID array, an attempt to force the failed drives back online and rebuild the configuration is made, whereby damaging or corrupting the data on the array.
- Deleting data. Files, volumes, virtual machines or a SAN LUN is deleted by accident and there is no backup or the backup is old or corrupt.
We all have to be prepared to respond to the growing need for data recovery. It is our duty to stop deteriorating business conditions in the US due to critical data loss, which we know could be devastating to some of our clients.